by Jules Lister

Created on: August 22, 2009

When we say Enterprise we are not talking about small amounts of data such as even the most avid home user might have on their PC's. Even though the basic storage device, the Hard Disk, continues to grow in its ability to store data, today it is common to have 500GB, even 1TB, (Yes that a Terrabyte which is a million, million bytes).

Within enterprise type organisations the amount of data they use and generate continues to consume vast amounts of storage space, and there are two important things that they expect to be able to achieve with the information it represents.

First it needs to be immediately accessible on a daily basis for all users to ensure that they can carry out their relevant function so they can continue to run their business
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Perhaps more overlooked is the retention of that data or what is commonly known as backups. Making sure that if something happens to the live data that it can be reconstructed as quickly as possible.

Lets have a quick think about the live data, even in the smaller of enterprise businesses, the amount of data that is held for the daily operations almost invariably runs in to multiple Terrabytes and in some cases the heady heights of Petabytes, (a 1000 Terrabytes or a quadrillion bytes), this is huge. Even with the best of today's Servers it is simply not viable to be able to store this data on single Servers.
It will require the use of external storage arrays, these are devices that attach to Servers and simply put are are just shelves of disk drives that do nothing else then store data.

As there are generally many users who need to retrieve this data another very important factor that needs to be addressed to get this data from these arrays as quickly as possible. In this area there are several technologies that have been developed for this purpose, Fibre Channel, (FC) and iSCSI (SCSI over Internet) are two of today's leading contenders.

Many top vendors, HP, EMC, IBM and Dell for example, have ranges of models from small storage arrays at low cost to very high end expandable solutions. The smaller ones are fixed with their total capacity usually to around 2-4 TB where as the larger scalable devices can start around 4-10TB but can be expanded to 100's or even 1000s of TB. Each of course have related cost and implementation differences that allow flexibity for differing enterprise businesses.

Bear in mind though that these do require relevant infrastructures to operate. With FC you will need to implement a Storage Area Network

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